Oak Creek to update town plan

Planning commission wary of new annexations

Oak Creek — The Oak Creek Planning Commission told the Town Board Thursday night that there should be no more annexation until the town’s comprehensive plan is updated.

The Planning Commission’s main concern is that the town should conduct a “water storage study to deal with the growth that these annexations will bring and how it might affect the town of Oak Creek.”

The town’s comprehensive plan, which looks at community growth for the future, is supposed to be updated every five years, but the plan hasn’t been updated in a decade.

Though the Oak Creek Planning Commission serves only as an advisory to the Town Board, Mayor J. Elliott took the commission’s decision to heart.

“(The planning commission) just forced this to be our No. 1 (priority),” he said. “We need to go after it and get this done now.”

Mayor Pro-Tem Angie KenCairn is researching a Colorado Department of Local Affairs grant that would give the board funds to update the plan. Another option is to hire planning department graduate students from a Colorado university to help the town with the project, she said.

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Because the town does not have the funds to facilitate the project, the board must look to other options.

During its discussion Thursday night, the board agreed the most important thing is to get community feedback on how the town wants to grow.

“I think the community needs to be involved because these are the people that will be impacted by any possible annexation,” board member Dave Fisher said.

Town Clerk Karen Halterman was mayor the last time the plan was updated and said holding several public work sessions soliciting public input will be crucial to the project.

“It’s important for people to express their vision of what they’d like to see or not like to see,” she said.

In other business, the Town Board:

-Adopted a resolution amending an ordinance to allow the Town Board to appoint commissioners. The amendment corrected an existing ordinance that gave the town mayor the ability to appoint the commissioners.

-Heard from Public Works Director Jim Photos who explained why it cost $10,600 to fix its street sweeper. The repairs originally were expected to be $7,000. The additional costs came from unforeseen repairs that needed to be completed and that were found only after mechanics began working on the machine.